When the third round --- the Round of 16, they called it --- ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and AMK disappeared to somewhere within the competition aisle. I went back to the stuff I'd been doing (more on that below) and occasionally checked in on the Matchplay brackets. These, the people running the Women's North American Championship Series tried to keep up to date at least on how many wins each competitor had. (Annoyingly, the web site doesn't track which games were played, never mind what order, but at least some information beats nothing.) When I did look I saw ominous news: AMK was up two games to one. It's the first time she's been down in a match, so far as I know.
Worse, she stayed there for a long while. I'd keep coming back to the site and refreshing and find that they were sitting there at two games to one. I supposed that they had had more games and the results just hadn't posted. I also supposed that since bunnyhugger hadn't come to me with disappointment about being knocked out --- or joy about moving on --- that there hadn't been any decision yet. Not so; turns out, they were just in a line for games and had to wait for a table to be clear. The format adopted this year, with everyone picking three games each, also commits people to playing the first game named, so there's no changing your mind if there's too long a wait for Road Show or whatever. So there was just a lot of waiting.
Still. AMK was good. One game stands out as an example of this, Stern's 2018 game The Beatles. Set as it was to the hardest possible tournament settings (no ball save, multiball isn't unlocked just by playing a third ball, rubber posts on the outline guards removed so it's easier for balls to drop out of play) bunnyhugger was generally putting up scores of a half million points or so --- a quarter her usual --- and doing pretty well by that. AMK put up two and a half million points. This would not be the only time in the tournament AMK put up such a preposterous score on this game played this tough, either.
bunnyhugger manages to win a second game that round, but that's all. AMK wins, four games to two. In some consolation, AMK goes on to win the whole tournament --- never being taken to more than six games in a round --- and declares she's not going to compete in the Women's World Championship, an independent event she's slated to compete in Saturday and Sunday, because she had promised to retire from competitive pinball if she won. She is eventually coaxed out of this decision (and does not win the Women's World Championship.) She hasn't been recorded in another International Flipper Pinball Association-sanctioned event since then, but it has only been a couple weeks.
bunnyhugger is disappointed, but, you know, not heartbroken. She's still getting congratulatory texts rolling in from friends and, after all, she really did only want to win one round. Winning two just proved to herself, if not everyone, that she really is a good player, able to at least make it interesting for the pros.
In the meanwhile, what was I up to? Sometimes stepping into the VIP lounge to watch the streaming or snag some Oreos, sure. At some point I went back out to the car to eat some breakfast buffet stuff I'd stashed away. On the way back in I saw guys rolling a brand-new pinball game out of a U-Haul. This would be Pulp Fiction, based on the movie, a brand-new game that's designed to have the look and feel of a mid-to-late 80s table as much as possible. Among other things it has a segmented LED screen, and not the LED televisions of a post-2017 game or even the dot-matrix displays of most any pinball machine since 1991. They would set that up and it would join the venue. I don't know if it was entered into the side tournaments or the Women's World Championship; there is something bold in putting a game literally nobody has touched into your contest, though.
But otherwise I was playing pinball games. Wizards' World Arcade does not operate as a pay-one-price arcade, so every game cost from 25 cents up to a dollar, a condition bunnyhugger had warned me about, so I was ready. And while they had a fair number of the newer games, like, I can play Foo Fighters at home. I was more interested in the older games, like Creature From The Black Lagoon, or the rarer games, such as Lectronaimo or the James Bond 60th Anniversary table.
What catches my eye, and keeps getting my quarters, is their FunHouse. Everyone loves it and it's regarded as the start of Williams's murderer's row of awesome pinball games of the 90s. Wizard's World has tricked out their FunHouse, particularly in putting in LED bulbs. These have great benefits in power savings, of course. And in being less stressful on games, since they don't force the wooden playfields to endure nearly as much heat. But they have drawbacks, including that they are much brighter than the incandescents they replace, and they will shed light at voltages which the incandescent bulbs wouldn't. (Or would be only partially lit.)
And, oh, but the high score table is low. All but one of the scores on it are the default round-number scores that indicate nobody's gotten on the table since it was last reset. 15 million would get the grand championship. That's a bit of a climb, but ... I could do that, surely? I've beaten that on location pinball games, getting over twice that multiple times. The games here are set up harder, but all I'd really need is to get two or three jackpots and I'm in.
Well, dear reader, I failed. I could get a bunch of good games together, and could get to averaging five or six million points a game. But I could not beat the 15 million grand champion score. I got the hang of some good, tough shots --- I've come to realize the Gangway shots are an under-appreciated part of the game --- but I can't claim the grand championship the game.
Something I can claim? The ability to photograph stuff at the Jackson County Fair. I can't claim that Livejournal's servers are going to serve the pictures, though, so good luck to us all.
While the carousel's your basic travelling fairground ride with fiberglass horses, they were painted nicely, including on the interior, non-romance side, like here.
The outside half of the above horse and oh, yeah, I guess there is less detail on the side where it doesn't show, although not dramatically less.
So is a zebra a purple horse with black stripes or a black horse with purple stripes?
This next picture makes me realize there are a lot of purple horses on this carousel. Someone must have had a paint bucket.
It was the last night for the carnival and they were winding down the ticket booths and everything.
I like how nice and bright the fries and the interior of the Ferris wheel are against the night sky.
Trivia: The income tax passed in the Civil War raised about 60 percent of its revenue from New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Source: A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, Scott Reynolds Nelson.
Currently Reading: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age, Andrew Whitby.
